Academic Writing

Assignment ‘Smart-Technologies’ is a systems engineering company that develops condition monitoring systems for different industries to support a wide range of applications, including oil and gas, aerospace, wind turbines, and automotive and industrial machinery. As a Research and Development (R&D) engineer in the 'Smart- Technologies’ company, you have been asked to design and develop a condition monitoring system (CMS) for a wind turbine manufacturer that has requested a condition monitoring system to monitor a new design of gearbox that will replace one of their current wind turbine gearboxes (see Appendix A). The CMS should utilise at least two different monitoring techniques, such as vibration, acoustic emission, or online oil analysis, in order to provide reliable information about normal and abnormal gearboxes and possible gearbox failures. The CMS should also include the measurement of temperature and speed. Provide a detailed, professional report for your R&D director that contains the following: 1- An evaluation of the different condition monitoring techniques that can be used in your condition monitoring system for the wind turbine gearbox and their application in predictive/condition based and proactive maintenance strategies. 2- A design of a condition monitoring system that incorporates vibration analysis and at least one other monitoring technique and their sensors, signal conditioning and data acquisition (DAQ)/ controller. Equations and calculations for the provided gearbox design to be included in the appendices. 3- A condition monitoring software program using NI LabVIEW to log the measurement data and provide the following parameters and warning alarms when limits are exceeded. Measurement data files for parameters a, b and, c below to be included in the appendices. a) Gearbox oil level b) Temperature of gearbox oil or ambient air c) Gearbox input shaft speed d) Vibration frequency domain analysis based on the expected frequency calculations according to the provided gearbox design parameters. 4- A critical assessment of a temperature sensor characteristics that can be used in wind turbine gearboxes or ambient air; use the NI DAQ PCI-6221, BNC-2120 accessory and NI LabVIEW software. 5- An evaluation of proposals that can be offered to the wind turbine manufacturer to develop your CMS in the next phases of development; this evaluation is conducted using full detailed proposals included in the appendices for the following: (a) Reduction of gearbox power losses to improve the wind turbine performance. (b) Any further improvements you may plan to include in the next phases of development such as the use of an advanced condition monitoring approaches to eliminate any false alarms that the traditional CMS may provide.